Good Morning. This Sunday is a day of remembrance. Ten years ago on this day, at almost this very hour, terrorists struck in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, savagely killing more innocents than we could bear. Even today’s freshmen, 7 or 8 at the time, can tell you precisely where they were when they heard -- just as many of us older can recall the moment when Walter Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Some memories are indelible.
That September 11 also opened a door into what has become an extremely difficult, disappointing decade for this country – a stream of wars, natural disasters, economic shocks, and moments of political lunacy. We have entered “a dark wood”, as Dante would call it, and we do not yet see sunlight.
Today and in those surrounding, there will be a multitude of fora where people will honor victims and the families of 9/11. We will celebrate the heroes as well -- firemen and policemen climbing up the stairs of the Twin Towers toward death as others scrambled down to safety. Their stories will be told again, their pictures cherished. In other gatherings, elbows flying, we will debate what followed – a ten-year war on terror unleashed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and places beyond. Threats persist, as we have seen this week, but some will argue -- I am among them -- that it is time to move beyond a “war on terror” and pay closer attention at home. We must find our way out of this dark wood. Let the debates rage on.
But at this moment at this place, we have a different mission. Here at Memorial Church, the sermon has traditionally been an exercise in connecting the dots between the teachings of scripture, Christian faith and contemporary experience. It is not a place to seek policy answers, as we do at the Kennedy School, but to draw wisdom about our lives from our faith.
You may then wonder why I am here. Let me assure you: so do I. And I can guarantee, so does my wife Anne. As you know, behind many a Harvard man stands a woman – laughing. Others are far more worthy to speak.
In view of this predicament, I thought it best this morning to dig back into our own memories here at this church, recalling what we learned through the teachings of our own pastor at the time, our beloved Reverend Peter J. Gomes. He is no longer here, but many of us -- when asked our denomination -- continue to answer as Skip Gates once did: “We are Gomesians, sir.” We honor him best by remembering his teachings.
If he were here now, by the way, probably the first thing Peter would say is, “David, remember to keep it a little light” As you know, he believed that the central message of Christianity is not about life after death but how we live before death. And he believed that laughter must be a vital part of living, even in somber moments.
Many fondly recall what he told us one Easter service before sending out the collection plates, “The good news is that we have all the money we will ever need for Memorial Church. The bad news is that it is in your pockets!"
He loved to tell of his visits with the Queen Mother in England. How often he would introduce the subject with a twinkle, “If there is one thing neither the Queen Mother nor I can stand, it is a name dropper.”
That was Peter. “The ultimate weapon,” he once wrote, “in the face of evil or sorrow, sadness or death, is not stoic virtue and the stiff upper lip but laughter, for where laughter is, God cannot be far away.”
So, what did Peter teach us a decade ago? And how might those lessons apply now? I will dwell here on his lessons from 9/11 but then turn to how our lives have changed since 9/11 -- and how, in my humble judgment, we should look afresh at our responsibilities as Christians.
Let us begin by retracing Peter’s path. On September 9, 2001, two days before the attacks, Peter’s opening sermon for the semester was based upon a lesson from Micah; that is among our lessons today. The day after the attacks, he spoke at morning prayers; his closing prayers will be our closing prayers. His first full sermon in Memorial Church after the attacks was on September 23; his lesson then, from Ecclesiasticus, is among our lessons now. And the title he chose for that first sermon after 9/11 is our title today, in his honor: “Outer Turmoil; Inner Strength”.
Down deep, Peter was less shocked by the attacks then than one might suppose. In a book of his sermons from that period -- dedicated, incidentally, to his dear friend Preston Williams – he wrote that after 9/11, he was frequently asked if the horrors of that day had changed his preaching plan for the year. Everyone knew he planned his sermons for the year in the summer before. No, he responded, he didn’t change his plan. Why? Because he had long believed that we will in a dangerous, precarious world and preaching must help us cope with. In John’s gospel, he reminds us, Jesus famously said, “In the world ye shall have tribulation…”
That was the basis of the first point that Peter wanted us to understand about 9/11. In a time of ease and rampant materialism, he thought, too many Christians had embraced a misconception: they thought we had a deal with God. If we would live relatively good lives, God would look after America, protecting us from harm. Weren’t we the chosen people, the city on a hill? So, when terror struck, people cried, “Whatever happened to our deal? Has God gone to sleep on duty? Is He AWOL? Where is God?”
But scriptures as well as history tell us something different – that life brings constant turmoil and tribulation. It goes with the territory of being human. Just look at the history of the Jews, from Egypt to the Holocaust, Peter argued. Look, too, at Ecclesiasticus from the Apocrypha, the lesson he chose for that first sermon after 9/11: “My son, if you aspire to be a servant of the Lord, prepare yourself for testing. Set a straight course and keep to it, and do not be dismayed in the face of adversity.” The assumption underlying the entire passage is that life is tough, deal with it. Or as Peter liked to say about coping with adversity, “Get used to it; get over it; get on with it.”
In his final book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, Peter writes of a vibrant, educated woman who once came to him for counsel. She was struggling with a grim diagnosis of cancer. She had good medical care but needed help in dealing with God’s mercy and her own mortality. Peter recommended that she read through all of the 150 Psalms, preferably within two or three days, and come back. She did and exclaimed, “Whoever wrote them had exactly my same sense of ups and downs, exaltation and despair.” She came to understand that the Psalms, taken together, are a roller-coaster of emotions, turmoil, frustration, unfairness, anger, and yes, joy and laughter. They gave her permission to respond to God and to her cancer as the psalmists had. God hadn’t disappeared for her nor for us.
Instead, argued Peter – and this was his second, basic point after 9/11 – the coming of trouble is when people rediscover that God is still there. Scripture tells us God is with us in the “valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23), “a very present help in trouble”. (Psalm 46). Peter spoke beautifully about a God of comfort, a God who walks beside us in times of trouble.
Those of you who were here in Cambridge on that fateful September day ten years ago will remember that around 5 o’clock, something remarkable happened: about 5,000 people gathered here on the steps of Memorial church for an impromptu, ecumenical religious service. Peter spoke, as did the incoming university president, Larry Summers.
May I say parenthetically, it is important to remember that gathering for another reason. As the university searches for a successor to Peter Gomes, a few ask whether in the 21st century Harvard should continue to have this church at the center of the Yard. Those who instinctively came to these steps on that day of horror sent a resounding affirmation.
For most of us in trouble, the inner strength we seek is the power to endure. I have found that in teaching leadership at the Kennedy School, what students most want to talk about is how they can get through tough times – loss of a job, loss of a loved one, scandal, defeat. Harvard students are accustomed to lives of success but they harbor fears of adversity and failure. Scripture tells us that we can find that inner strength through faith – or as St. Paul says in J.B. Phillips’ colorful translation, with God walking at our side, “we may be knocked down, but we are never knocked out.”
Many of us might leave the arguments there, but not Peter. He says, yes, the power to endure is important but to discover God fully during times of adversity, something more is needed: lives of compassion. This was his third major point about 9/11. In his sermons and writings, he repeatedly returned to a story about British POWs in World War II held in a Japanese prison camp on the River Kwai. They were initially very religious, praying, singing hymns and the like, trusting that God would fortify them. God didn’t deliver, and they became disillusioned and angry, giving up outward shows of faith. But after a while, the stronger men found they needed to care for the weaker, protecting them, even helping them die. And it was in those acts of compassion that they finally began to discover a spirit of God in their midst. Peter’s conclusion: “The strength that God gives is available to those who care for others, for they are showing the spirit of Jesus.”
Strikingly, we find that this focus on compassion was not only in Peter’s sermon after 9/11 but also in his sermon just before. On that Sunday, September 9, he was greeting freshman to Harvard. He was trying to help them understand how to anchor their lives. Coming to an institution like this, they might assume he thought it complicated, but actually, he told them, it is simple. Turn, he said, to prophet Micah, chapter 6, verse 8 -- “He has showed you, O man, what is good: and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Notice all of the action verbs – to “do”, “love” and “walk”. The biblical scholar Marcus Borg interprets them to mean that even as we look to God to walk with us, we must walk with God. Through not only belief but action, we should live our lives with mercy, generosity, and kindness -- in a word, with compassion for others. By anchoring ourselves in enduring values, in effect, we increase our own capacity for endurance -- we gain “strength for the journey”.
And so there, as best I can discern, are the three central lessons that Peter Gomes tried to teach us about 9/11:
*Do not make the easy assumption that if you live reasonably well, God will protect you. “In the world ye shall have tribulation.”
*When adversity hits, then, God hasn’t disappeared – just the opposite: that is when one learns that God can be there at your side, a refuge, a source of inner strength. “Set a straight course and keep to it, and do not be dismayed in the face of adversity.”
*Finally, scripture tells us that inner strength comes not only through stoic bravery – important as that is – but also through walking with God -- acting with compassion for others who need our help.
Lessons of faith from one we have loved.
Well, you may respond, that was then. That was ten years ago on September 11, 2001. What about now? What applications should we make today, September 11, 2011? I believe these lessons have as much force and vitality today as they did then.
But the nature of the threat we face has changed so that what is required of us as people of faith has changed, too. This may seem off point and jarring on a day when we are remembering 9/11. Please forgive if I offend. But I believe that if we truly want to face up to what the years have brought since that September day, it should be said.
We are being tested in a very different way than we were just after 9/11. Then we were frightened by what bad people were doing to us. Why did they hate us? Today the larger threat comes from what we are allowing to happen to each other. No one can equate the murder of some 3,000 innocents with the failure of financial institutions. But in assessing this past decade, historians may record that what happened in September, 2008 -- when the Great Recession officially began -- was as transformative as what happened in September, 2001.
Millions of our fellow citizens are now suffering, torn apart by a new turmoil. Our population has grown by 30 million since 9/11 but we actually have fewer jobs. Storefronts vacant, homes underwater, savings gone, 46 million on food stamps -- the story is too familiar. Then, too, money no longer trickles down; it is gushing up. Consider: the median net worth -- not annual income but accumulated net assets -- for an Hispanic adult is $9,100; for a black, $9,300 ...and for a white, $143,600.
These are challenges that we talk about in classrooms around Harvard. But do we talk about them enough here in Memorial Church and in other centers of worship? What do they ask of us as people of faith? What should our ethic of responsibility be in the midst of this new turmoil?
If Peter were among us still, I would like to believe that he would have spent this past summer in Plymouth preparing sermons that would double down on Micah 6:8 -- that he would urge us to embrace even more fully lives of service and compassion. President Drew Faust understands: since the day she took office, she has encouraged undergraduates to turn away from the lure of financial riches to the call of service. And it is working: three years ago, 9 percent of Harvard seniors applied to Teach for America; last spring, 18% applied. Our graduate schools are now honoring returning veterans so that some 200 now study here -- many of them the best in class. There is no better example than the man from whom we heard our first reading, Seth Moulton. The younger generation gets it -- and we should support them.
But what more should we ask of ourselves? What does our faith ask of us in this new tribulation? After the first 9/11, all of us wanted to embrace our families. After this 9/11, how should we embrace families not our own, families who don’t live in the zip code 02138?
Prospects are growing that our nation is sliding into a lost decade for our economy -- one paralleling the experience of Japan. If so, the disparities among us could present the most serious moral dilemmas we have faced since the days of civil rights.
I do not pose this as a way to support Democratic or Republican solutions. They have deep, genuine differences in their views but those fights should be left outside the door of this church. What we should focus on here is how our faith calls upon each of us to engage in lives of compassion, service and leadership. We dare not live in a society in which a small number of us live in sunshine but great multitudes are stuck in a “dark wood”. We dare not stumble into a decade in which compassion is lost, too.
We must instead return to what the prophet Micah tells us in no uncertain terms: that it is not enough to be passive, asking God to be present with us, to walk alongside us. We must act to be present with God. We must do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly at His side. The miracle of faith is that in these acts of compassion -- in doing our best to walk alongside God -- we will find, like the men on the River Kwai, that He is there walking alongside side us, too. In our pursuit of enduring virtues, we find enduring strength. And with that strength, we shall continually renew our hope for the future.
Let us close, as Peter did the morning after September 11, with these prayers:
Increase in us, O God, the spirit of neighborliness among us, that in peril, we may uphold one another, in calamity serve one another, in suffering tend one another, and in homelessness, loneliness, or exile befriend one another. Grant us brave and enduring hearts, that we may strengthen one another till the disciplines and testing of these days be ended and Thou does give again peace in our time; through Jesus Chris our Lord, Amen.
Fix Thou our steps, O Lord, that we stagger not at the uneven motions of the world, but go steadily on our way, neither censuring our journey by the weather we meet, nor turning aide for anything that may befall us. Amen.
- David Gergen